An existing admission control strategy used in the provision of web-hosting services is a “tail-dropping” strategy, which rejects a job when the queue length exceeds a specified bound. Chen et al (An Admission Control Scheme for Predictable Server Response Time for Web Accesses, 10th International World Wide Web Conference, May 2001, Hong Kong) present a prediction-based admission control scheme that decides to accept or reject jobs based on the predicted workload.
This prediction-based strategy described by Chen et al is an improvement over the existing tail-dropping strategy. Using such a prediction-based strategy incorporates variable workload, rather than simply specifying conditions in which jobs are dropped, per the existing tail-dropping strategy.
The approach described by Chen et al is certainly an improvement over existing techniques. This approach, however, is still relatively unsophisticated. Issues relating to commercial provision of networked services are unaddressed by the control strategy proposed by Chen et al. Thus, a need clearly exists for an improved manner of admission control for networked services.